Chapter thirty-seven - Games Without Frontiers Looking back, it seems that the problem as far as Mick French was concerned wasnt that he was jet-slagged, jet-lagged or jet-anything-else. Hed fooled himself into thinking that once he was in West Berlin the sheer atmosphere of the place would inspire him and turn him dead quickly into a heavyweight again. I suggest to the guy that that was perhaps a touch naive. “Youre out of order,” he snaps back, probably because he doesnt dig what naive means. “I really got into it. The glam thing was right out. I looked pretty Gothic and manic-depressive, I can tell you. Then, once I was out on the streets I just got a bit carried away. Hans, Knees and Bumpserdaisy, or whatever that bunch were called, wanted to get us into some right dives so I fobbed them off with a half-arsed excuse and went to have me some good, clean fun.” The good, clean fun Mick French was keen to go off and have was in fact very bad and downright dirty. Let loose in the land hed dreamt about as a far-from-germ-free adolescent, he gave it some with his own mini-blitzkrieg. First, he found a bar and had himself a mega Hopfeinenstreinenhoff session which ended with him squaring up to a transvestite dwarf and being thrown out for lowering the tone of the place. No longer able to goose-step in a straight line, he headed for the Reichstag. Once there, pissed off at not seeing the building in ashes as Adolf had left it, he stuck a finger under his nose in Führer moustache mode and shouted at passers-by like it was the Nuremberg rally. Soon the French resistance began buckling in the face of a growing crowd of angry Berliners. Realising, that he risked being ripped to shreds if he hung around, Herr Tinsel high-tailed it out of there as best he could. As mistakes go, that was a Frank Black-sized one. Scrambling over a high wall and landing safely on the other side, French staggered across a strip of wasteland and onto a brightly-lit Berlin street. The only catch was it wasnt the right Berlin. Without knowing it, the lord of the rumbling bass had defected to East Germany. While the GDR guards were shit hot at spotting commie kids trying to get over the Wall to the west, it was another story in the opposite direction. By being just about the only person to do it the wrong way, Mick French had moved from the land of the free to the land of the Stasi in a few fateful seconds. He may not have meant to go over the Berlin Wall, he may not have actually played on the other side of the Berlin Wall once hed got over it, but French had still become the first western rock figure to sneak a peek behind the Iron Curtain. He did it way before Sir Elton was playing to massive Moscow crowds whod been so starved of music for so long that even “Dont Go Breakin My Heart” sounded as ground-breaking as The Velvets first album. Today, after the Walls come tumbling down, its easy to forget how jaw-dropping the French invasion of East Berlin was. Now every two-bit thrash band tours Lithuania and former Eastern Bloc festival goers get treated to bottom of the barrel headliners that just dont do it back home anymore (How about a bumper bill of Murray Head, Amazulu, Bad Manners and Johnny Hates Jazz?). Like it or not like it in the least, Mick French was a pioneer in east-west rock crossovers. If anyones to blame for Joe Cocker being able to croak his heart out in front of 50,000 poor souls in a field outside Dresden, its him. Hans Sonderbar wasnt too worried when he got back to the squat and found no sign of the former glam star. “He was a full-grown man. Heidi wanted to go searching for him. Dieter wanted another drink. We decided that he was probably out looking for some hot tarts. He loved our pastry shops. So, we were about to shoot up for the night when Bärbel (circus artist Bärbel Unheimlich) entered. She did not knock. No-one knocked in those days. Not like today.” Another thoughtful pause. “So, she came in, without knocking, and told us she had seen Herr Tinsel going over the Wall to the GDR. This we knew was serious. This we knew was auf wiedersehen to the games and fun.” Rather than going to the cops or to the Brit embassy, Sonderbar first tried to find a way out that wouldn’t create a diplomatic face-off that’d risk being about as much fun as a nuclear war. Amazingly, a decadent mate of his, performance artist Wolfgang Lächerlich, was one of the few people in Europe, let alone Germany, to have heard of Mick French before he became Herr Tinsel. Somehow, Lächerlich had been staying with body-painting buddies in San Francisco in the late sixties when French and Wadcock’s Blue Whale was spouting about there. He’d even been unlucky enough to have seen the band live. Now he managed to trawl from the very depths of his barbiturate-addled brain the name of Colin Wadcock. Wasting no time, Sonderbar and his clique breezed into the local Deutsch Post and found the phone number of the man in faraway Dunwich. “Jazz and I were beavering away on a new song of hers with the working title of “Turn On Your Love Light I Can’t See A Thing In Here,” when the phone rang,” Wadcock tells me. Im back chatting to my cosy primary source of info and strange substances. After Mick French it feels like coming out of a long tunnel into a bright, bright sunshiny day. “At first I thought it was a joke,” he goes on. “Not the phone ringing, but the guy on the other end once I’d picked up the phone that had been ringing. Slowly I understood what he was saying. I was taken aback. One day Mick’s a teen pop puppet, the next he’s the spy who came in from the cold. The closest I’d ever got to East Germany was Norwich so I knew I needed help if I was going to sort out this enormous pickle. That was when Jazz mentioned her old man.” Although recently retired, Rear Admiral Rupert Fox-Hunt was still a paid-up member of the Freemasons’ mercenary chapter and had an address book chock-full of majors and generals, special service sadists and toady frogmen. Jasmine called him and fobbed him off with a story about the reds kidnapping one of our boys. The Rear Admiral went ballistic. When he came down off the ceiling, Fox-Hunt started making the calls that would get a task force together which could get into the GDR, grab Mick French and get back home in time for last orders. Thinking his former dad-in-law had things in hand, Colin Wadcock went back to trying to turn his wife into something vaguely like a sensitive singer-songwriter. “Daddy phoned back in a trice,” picks up Jasmine, not Colin, Wadcock. “He really is an angel. A bit of an old grouse sometimes, but an absolute darling.” I grit my teeth in a painful smile wishing shed hurry up and get it over with before my molars grind down to fine dust. “Daddy said it was frightfully dangerous and that none of his service chums wanted to do the dirty. I feel terrible saying this, but good, I thought. Serves Michael right after the way he mocked my Greek dip and tore me off a strip about that silly envelope. Anyway, when I told Collywobble the news he looked so small and helpless. I knew then how frightfully attached he was to that beastly man So, I jolly well swallowed my pride, called Daddy back and we worked out a super-duper plan.” The super-duper plan was super-duper risky. No dogs of war could be let off the leash in East Berlin without gambling with the very future of the planet so the operation would have to be done by a lone wolf. While Fox-Hunt could help get the man with the mission into the GDR, once in that nest of commies the dude chosen would be behind enemy lines and so lonesome he could cry. To work, the plan needed a cat with no army record and a cast-iron cover that wouldnt stir up suspicion. It was Jasmine who found the perfect person. “I couldnt believe she was even suggesting it,” laughs hubbie Colin with hearthside hindsight. “Like I say, East Anglia was as far east as Id been and I didnt want to change that. But then I thought of poor Mick freezing in a secret-police cell having his teeth pulled out and his testicles toasted. I knew I had to do it even though the bugger would never have done as much for me. Except if he could have got his end away into the bargain.”
Posted on: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 15:08:10 +0000
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